VIVA Germany

Viva (stylized VIVA, but not an acronym according to program director Dieter Gorny) was a German free-to-air music television channel, first broadcast on 1 December 1993. The channel was intended to compete against MTV Europe and was the sole German-language music TV channel after the closure of musicbox in 1988, while MTV was only broadcast in English until the introduction of MTV Germany in 1997. It was also supposed to focus more on German music and pop culture while MTV only broadcast anglophone music by artists primarily from North America, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. After years of competition for audience share, MTV Networks Europe eventually acquired VIVA on 14 January 2005, after it had exhausted its own efforts for superior ratings. MTV operated VIVA channels in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In June 2018, Viacom announced that it would shut down all VIVA operations worldwide at the end of that year. The channel ceased to broadcast at 14:00 on 31 December 2018, being replaced by Comedy Central.